Question Time chair – Fiona Bruce

I can’t help thinking that the BBC is trying to ensure they keep someone they regard as a star performer rather than appoint the best candidate. To me Fiona Bruce is a bit of a lightweight.
This is nothing against female presenters; any of Martha Kearney, Kirsty Wark, Sarah Montague or Emily Maitlis, among prominent BBC female staff could do a great job.
Emily Maitlis especially seems to have the steel and nerve for the job, given her no punches pulled interview with David Cameron’s former advisor Steve Hilton on last Wednesday’s Newsnight.
The only male I could think of as a suitable candidate was Jim Naughtie, who has demonstrated over the years that he has all the credentials.
But that’s all academic. We’ll see how FB does in the QT bear pit.
I wish her well, nonetheless.

Inadvertent antler tangles can affect ones diction, I imagine.
I’m with you all the way regarding keeping the vile, ignorant and vicious out of the homestead.
It annoys me that their peculiar take on “political balance” seems to mean that when a panellist is talking obvious shite, they are not pulled up on it. Accuracy and truth are much more important than “balance”.

I agree with your view of QT. TBH I doubt it’ll make much difference who they have fronting the show – and it IS a show: to mistake QT for a serious political discussion programme would be like mistaking Clarkson-era Top Gear for a serious motoring magazine programme. Whoever fronts QT, I won’t be watching it.

I have always said to me wife that because she is rather sweet an unassuming that I could imagine her in S+M gear doing naughty things. Maybe there will be a new line of questioning?
Victoria Coren would have been a much better choice.

Yes I like her a lot but she wouldn’t be an obvious choice. QT entirely depends on the panel, and there’s too much reliance on what I call the idiot seat – where they put the situational poet, the rock star, the comedian. And the shock opinion seat – usually occupied by Isobel Oakeshott for some reason. If the planned occupants look OK I watch, otherwise I dodge it. It’s a weekly proof of Churchill’s famous comment that the best argument against democracy is a 5 minute conversation with the average voter, though perhaps the very act of wanting to be on Question Time means you’re not average – the average bod in the street generally doesn’t have a clue about things beyond their immediate circle.

A slight tangent… I find it disturbing that so-called ‘big beasts’ like Dimbleby and the loathsome Humphreys get to hang around for decades, long past pension age – in jobs where clearly there are others who could do them just as well and with fresh energy and a different perspective. Humphreys bumptiousness and constant interrupting are a pain in the arse. It’s long past time he went.

On the other hand, there are cases where special knowledge and singular talent should be taken into consideration. RTE last year obliged an incredibly good late-night radio presenter, Carl Corcoran, to retire on reaching 65 despite his nightly show ‘The Blue of the Night’ on its Lyric FM station being a magnificently crafted assemblage of music across genres, all brilliantly made to work in terms of its sequencing and mood and with Carl’s voice perfect for the late-night vibe, and his knowledge of music incredibly wide and up to date. He was a singular asset to RTE. And they said, ‘No, you’ve got to you’ – not even allowing him to keep contributing on a freelance basis, which they do with other presenters and producers. Seemingly it’s who you know, or some other unwritten claptrap.

Up to a point, it shouldn’t. But there’s a point where, unless they’re offering something unique/difficult to replace – and I don’t believe Dimbleby or Humphreys are – they become ‘bed blockers’ or personality cults. I feel the same way, incidentally, about some of the non-news presenters getting colossal salaries from licence fee monies. Plenty of people could do their jobs and would love to do so at a fraction of their fees.

@Colin: that’s precisely why I despise so much of RTE’s output. The quality – Mark Cagney always my go-to as an example – are hounded out the door on spurious grounds while the well-connected dreck are free to batten on the licence payers’ largesse for ever.

She’s very tall. Not sure why but I took an instant dislike to her many years ago. Just the sort of public school educated patronising presenter that the BBC seem to love and give way too many opportunities to.

There is a Haberdashers’ Aske’s School which is fee paying. It has a boys and girls school and is in Elstree, Herts. It’s not the one Fiona Bruce went to which was in New Cross and was a state school. I knew a couple of kids that went to Elstree while I did go to the local comp.

“A state secondary school with academy status located in New Cross. The school was formerly a grammar school, then a comprehensive City Technology College and is now an Academy, operating between two sites near New Cross Gate in South-East London.”

@Vulpes: Eddie was my main man on the Beeb and I’ve yet to listen to him on LBC (in fact, I don’t even know if his new show has started). I hold out the faintest hope that he will return in glory and majesty. The Jesus of Dundee!

You just know that Andrew Neill is weeping bitter tears. He wants to be there, jacket off – journalisty braces on, asking the tough questions of rugged warhorse silverback alpha males like Iain Duncan-Smith and Jacob Rees-Mogg. He’ll want to look into the camera and have a Jerry Springer-like one minute summary at the end.

I get BritBox via Amazon Prime, and QT is one of the programmes available. I sometimes briefly toy with the idea of watching it, but then I think about them constantly having cunts like Farage, Tim Martin (who looks like he keeps his daughter-wife chained to a post in the barn), Oakeshott, Hartley-Brewer et al as guests, plus the endless stream of gammons planted in the audience, and I think “FUCK NO”

Any Questions is much better – better Dimblebum, no fatuous ‘ask the audience’ bits (the audience at home can’t hear you, so shut up) and the inestimable Anita Anand to deal patiently with the phone-in gammons on Any Answers).

Fair play to the BBC on shaking things up in the diversity stakes: they’ve replaced a white, privately-educated, middle-class Oxford graduate with a white, privately-educated, middle-class Oxford graduate.

The Haberdasher’s Company has a Livery Hall in the City of Londonhttp://www.haberdashers.co.uk/home.php
It’s a modern hall, unlike many of the other ancient guilds and is near Smithfield and St Barts Hospital. There’s no picture of Fiona Bruce there.

I read somewhere (but can’t recall where) that the Big D is standing down partly for these reasons – lots of travel along with a format that increasingly puts equal airtime ahead of critical / journalistic interrogation given that any attempt to exercise the latter just yields mountainous accusations of BBC bias for daring to call out some of our less gifted politicians.It’s not exactly a prime gig – less worthwhile than Newsnight or C4 News.

No-one has mentioned Kay Burley yet, the choice of Golden Retrievers across the UK.

International School of Milan for a few years after primary on The Wirral, before Comprehensive (a good one) from 14 to 18. Then Oxford and University Of London Institute in Paris.
I dunno about you lot, but I’d rather have someone with a really good education in charge of these programmes than some dimwit. While we may not like it very much, being really well-educated is still pretty much synonymous with having gone to a good university and that is still pretty much synonymous with being at least comfortably off.
That ideal world we’d like is still somewhere over the horizon.

Without wanting to start off a new Me Too thread, Fiona Bruce has an appeal to gentlemen of a certain age (such as myself). If she ever fancied a bit of rough (comprehensive secondary, vocational first degree, no masters or doctorate) I would be tempted.

I gave up on QT a long time back. I think the presence of the studio audience and the fact that they’re allowed to applaud encourages too many of the participants to play to the gallery and come out with a lot of dishonest sloganeering.